Tour de France 2017 – L’Etape du Tour – Briançon to Izoard – 180km / 3,400m

L’Etape du Tour is always a classic of an event but for 2017 the parcours is going to provide a really tough challenge.  At almost 180km in length the route begins with a fairly relaxed first 120km taking in a scenic tour of Lac de Serre-Ponçon before tackling the Col de Vars and a tough summit finish of the southern slopes of the Col d’Izoard.  Expect a few hours of crazy huge pelotons until the climbing properly gets underway!

View the full, interactive route here.

Check out my Fly-Through of the route:

Managing your Strava Starred Segments for Garmin Live Segments

In summer 2015 Garmin introduced Live Strava Segments and since then both Mio and Wahoo Fitness have also introduced the feature to their recent devices (full list of supported devices).  Currently the Garmin devices are limited to bringing in just 100 of your starred Strava segments. This resulted in a number of VeloViewer users asking for a quicker way to manage their starred segments when planning trips away as they were going beyond that 100 segment limit. Strava kindly opened up their API for starring segments so I’ve added in the ability to star and unstar segments in every possible location in VeloViewer to make life a bit easier for you.

Wherever you see the star next to a segment you can now press it to toggle its starred state.  These locations are:

I’ve also added a count of your currently starred segments to your Summary page in the header of the “Segment Stats” section which links to your segment list passing the filter to show just the starred segments.

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Fly Through Your Strava Activities, Routes and Segments With Cesium “Earth” View

For a long time VeloViewer has had the option to export your activities as a KML file to then view in Google Earth but I always wanted to get the equivalent features embedded within the site. A recent discovery of the Cesium JavaScript library has made this possible and has opened the door to all kinds of interesting possibilities. Piloted recently on the Route Details page I’ve now rolled out this new “Earth” view to your activities and segments.

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Tour of Britain 2016 – Key Climbs

A very lumpy Tour of Britain this year with plenty of double-digit gradients to be tackled and the British public will be pleased to see another classic Lake District climb on the route. Even the short Bristol time trial is far from flat.  There are too many climbs to list them all but here are the top bits of road where I think we’ll see the main action.

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Tour de France 2016 Stages

The 2016 Tour de France already feels a distant memory but I thought I’d share links to the routes for all of the stages.  Due to my contract with Team Sky I don’t share these before the race but hopefully people will find some of them useful for both checking out the route and also checking out the old and new functionality of my Route Details page. Make sure you check out the Kinomap videos on the segments and also the “Earth” view.

Stage/Date Type Distance Elevation
1 – 02/07/2016

Mont-Saint-Michel / Utah Beach Sainte-Marie-du-Mont

Stage 187.8 km (+8.1 km) 1,123 m
2 – 03/07/2016

Saint-Lô / Cherbourg-en-Cotentin

Stage 182.7 km (+9.1 km) 2,119 m
3 – 04/07/2016

Granville / Angers

Stage 223.6 km (+6.0 km) 1,984 m
4 – 05/07/2016

Saumur / Limoges

Stage 236.3 km (+10.2 km) 2,062 m
5 – 06/07/2016

Limoges / Le Lioran

Stage 215.8 km (+6.3 km) 3,964 m
6 – 07/07/2016

Arpajon-sur-Cère / Montauban

Stage 190.6 km (+3.7 km) 1,983 m
7 – 08/07/2016

L’Isle-Jourdain / Lac de Payolle

Stage 162.2 km (+3.9 km) 2,494 m
8 – 09/07/2016

Pau / Bagnères-de-Luchon

Stage 183.1 km (+9.9 km) 4,398 m
9 – 10/07/2016

Vielha Val d’Aran / Andorre Arcalis

Stage 183.9 km (+3.8 km) 4,622 m
10 – 12/07/2016

Escaldes-Engordany / Revel

Stage 197.1 km (+2.8 km) 2,263 m
11 – 13/07/2016

Carcassonne / Montpellier

Stage 161.4 km (+6.7 km) 1,432 m
12 – 14/07/2016

Montpellier / Mont Ventoux

Stage 177.2 km (+18.7 km) 2,446 m
13 – 15/07/2016

Bourg-Saint-Andéol / La Caverne du Pont-d’Arc

ITT 37.4 km 607 m
14 – 16/07/2016

Montélimar / Villars-les-Dombes Parc des Oiseaux

Stage 207.6 km (+5.5 km) 1,891 m
15 – 17/07/2016

Bourg-en-Bresse / Culoz

Stage 159.6 km (+5.7 km) 4,125 m
16 – 18/07/2016

Moirans-en-Montagne / Berne

Stage 206.5 km (+8.6 km) 1,991 m
17 – 20/07/2016

Berne / Finhaut-Emosson

Stage 184.2 km (+8.2 km) 3,825 m
18 – 21/07/2016

Sallanches / Megève

ITT 16.8 km 685 m
19 – 22/07/2016

Albertville / Saint-Gervais Mont Blanc

Stage 145.2 km (+6.3 km) 4,032 m
20 – 23/07/2016

Megève / Morzine-Avoriaz

Stage 146.7 km (+2.8 km) 3,683 m
20 – Etape du Tour

Megève / Morzine-Avoriaz

Stage 124.1 km 2,734 m
21 – 24/07/2016

Chantilly / Paris Champs-Élysées

Stage 110.9 km (+15.0 km) 808 m

Kinomap Video Integration for Strava Segments on VeloViewer

Kinomap, the home of fully geolocated videos (videos tied into GPS data), are now automatically matching up the 1,000’s of videos uploaded to their site with Strava segments and VeloViewer has entered into a cross-Channel collaboration to connect those with your own data.  You will now be able to filter your Segments List and the segments on your Activity and Route Details pages to discover those with Kinomap videos and of course watch the videos embedded in the VeloViewer Segment Details page.  So whether you are wanting to relive the views from past rides or check out the roads of your next holiday then this new integration is here to help.

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Rio Olympics Time Trial and Road Race Course Details (Men’s and Women’s)

The Rio Olympics’ road cycling events are set to be a real opportunity for the climbers with gradients approaching 20% on both the road race and time trial courses.  I suppose the sprinters have got the World Road Race Championships in Doha to look forward to this year! (Update: now also includes triathlon bike loop)

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Viewing GPX files in VeloViewer

Often events like sportives or races will provide GPX files of the course for you to upload to your GPS device, but I get lots of requests to be able to view those GPX files in VeloViewer in order to see 3D profiles, Google StreetView and other features of the VeloViewer Route Details page direct from these files. VeloViewer has two ways to do this, one is fast but slightly limited, the second is a bit more involved but provides all the features:

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How to view any Strava Segment in VeloViewer

This is one of the most commonly asked question I get but whose answer deserves more than just a place on the FAQ – “How do I view segments on VeloViewer that I haven’t ridden?”.  Maybe you’re planning a holiday or about to tackle a race or sportive and you want to check out what you’ve let yourself in for? Well, here’s how to do it.

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VeloViewer – Official Supplier to Team Sky

VeloViewer - Official Supplier to Team Sky“Working with Veloviewer has been one of the best improvements this year.”
Dario Cioni (Team Sky – Sports Director)

You may have noticed that Team Sky has been tweeting out VeloViewer 3D profiles as well as custom 2D VeloViewer profiles this year; behind the scenes I have been working closely with Team Sky’s performance staff providing a one-stop-shop for all of their race-recon needs for the 2016 season.

“VeloViewer is everything we need at our fingertips. It saves us time because we don’t have to navigate between different types of web sites to get all the technical details of the race parkour we require. You can even find, with street view, a nice cafe for your coffee stop!”
Nicolas Portal (Team Sky – Sports Director)

This is a really exciting development for VeloViewer. The early feedback has been great and many of the new features requested by Team Sky are available for everyone to use at https://veloviewer.com